AI That Performs: Embedding Intelligence into Creative, Direct Mail, and Omnichannel Operations Hosted by American Express (In-Person Only)

WELCOME REMARKS

DIRECT MAIL REIMAGINED: THE ANCHOR CHANNEL IN AN OMNICHANNEL WORLD

As marketing organizations increasingly prioritize digital channels, direct mail is often viewed as a legacy tactic rather than a strategic growth driver. Yet the data tells a different story. When direct mail is removed from the marketing mix, performance across email, web, paid media, and conversion channels can decline—revealing a significant but often undermeasured halo effect.

This executive panel will challenge conventional thinking about channel performance and explore why direct mail remains a critical anchor within today's omnichannel ecosystem. The discussion will focus on how direct mail amplifies digital engagement, strengthens customer response, and contributes to total marketing ROI when orchestrated as part of an integrated customer journey.

Attendees will gain insights into the operational flywheel that enables seamless coordination across direct mail and digital channels, learn how modern measurement approaches can better capture direct mail's incremental value, and understand why the future of marketing optimization requires a shift from channel-level metrics to omnichannel performance.

Keith Mcleod

VP, US Marketing Channel and Content American Express

USPS IN THE ERA OF AI-POWERING INNOVATIVE CUSTOMER SOLUTIONS

As new technologies reshape the marketing landscape, the United States Postal Service is innovating to introduce enhanced products, programs, and tools to help customers achieve better business outcomes. By pairing operational modernization with customer-facing innovation, USPS enables faster, more precise, compliant, and connected omnichannel campaigns.

During this session, attendees will explore how USPS is:

• Embedding technology into direct mail operations through new programs and promotions
• Helping marketers create, launch, and manage campaigns more efficiently through partnerships and emerging tools
• Using AI and API integrations to streamline the mailing promotions process and accelerate approval cycles

Together, we will examine how USPS is embedding intelligence into both internal systems and customer-facing solutions to make mail more accessible, efficient, and effective in an AI-driven marketing environment.

Steve Monteith

Chief Customer and Marketing Officer & Executive Vice President United States Postal Service

MAKING AI MATTER: FASTER CAMPAIGNS, SMARTER PERSONALIZATION & MEASURABLE RESULTS

This roundtable puts Audience Strategy at the center of AI's impact on direct mail. From advanced segmentation and data modeling to hyper-personalized creative and streamlined production, leaders across brands, agencies, printers, and suppliers will share how AI is transforming the end-to-end workflow. Expect practical examples of how smarter targeting and automation are accelerating campaign timelines, reducing costs, and driving more measurable, high-performing direct mail results.

Susan McNamee

SVP of Audience Strategy Media Horizons (Marketing Arm of Lindenmeyer Central)

DRIVING TRUST AND CAPTURING ATTENTION IN THE AGE OF AI: HOW AEO/GEO CAN PAIR WITH PHYSICAL MARKETING TO WIN BUSINESS

Answer engines and generative AI are disrupting the path to purchase marketers have come to rely on. Soon, consumers will no longer browse, compare, and click. They will ask, get a synthesized answer, and act, often without ever seeing a brand's owned digital properties. As AEO reshapes discovery and consideration, the middle of the funnel collapses into a single AI-mediated moment that rewrites the path to purchase.

However, consumer trust breaks down at the point of automated action. Overcoming this barrier requires outreach that feels authentic and human-driven. That is the opening for physical channels like direct mail: tangible, deliberate touchpoints that signal brand investment and legitimacy.

This session shows how AI is reshaping behavior across discovery, consideration, and conversion, and makes the case that physical and AI efforts are strongest in concert. Attendees will leave with a POV around consumer trust in AI, and forward-thinking concepts for pairing AI-driven discovery with human-feeling touchpoints.

Jonathan Yoon

VP, Head of Life Marketing Nationwide

AI RAISES THE BAR: MARKETING HAS TO CATCH UP

Most organizations aren't failing at AI — AI is exposing where marketing needs a full reset. Years of incremental growth created fragmented systems that now struggle under the pressure of scale, speed, and personalization. As we move toward an agentic future, fixing how marketing works becomes the real unlock for making AI perform.

Current models were built by channel and by team as the industry evolved. But does that make sense now? Whether driven by org structures, competing priorities, or resource constraints, the result is the same: fragmented workflows, disconnected systems, and operational complexity that limits scale. AI is forcing that reset. It exposes where workflows break, amplifies both strengths and weaknesses, and makes fragmented systems harder to sustain — not easier.

As we move toward a more agentic future, the fundamentals matter more. How work gets done becomes the constraint — or the unlock. In this session, Hilary Cook covers where traditional marketing models break under the pressure of AI, how to rethink workflows and governance without starting over, and how to embed AI directly into marketing systems — from briefing and content creation through omnichannel execution — while balancing speed, scale, and control with measurable impact.

Hilary Cook

Global VP, Marketing Operations Marriott Worldwide

THE ART AND SCIENCE OF OMNICHANNEL AI: UPGRADING MEASUREMENT, TARGETING & CREATIVES

While AI has drastically improved operational velocity, its true power lies in its ability to merge the "science" and "arts" of marketing into a single, holistic optimization engine. In this session, we will share how Wayfair's Marketing Science team embeds advanced AI and machine learning directly into our core workflows to drive measurable outcomes. We will dive into three practical use cases: first, how we leverage AI to enhance the trustworthiness and efficiency of our measurement trifecta—Experimentation, Multi-Touch Attribution (MTA), and Marketing Mix Modeling (MMM)—across both digital and offline channels. Second, we will disclose our cross-channel approach to audience governance, optimizing precisely where and how to reach customers. Finally, we will share internal successes in using AI to generate, evaluate, and optimize marketing creatives, successfully bridging the gap between rigorous data science and creative execution.

Jerry Chen

Head of Marketing and Measurement Science Wayfair

AI AND HUMAN CREATIVITY: WORKING BETTER TOGETHER

In the race to move faster, creativity and intelligence are still king. This session will explore how to use AI to accelerate the work around the work—iterations, versioning, workflow steps, and early-stage brainstorming—without lowering the standard of the final product. The focus is not on handing ideas over to a machine, but on using AI strategically so people can spend less time on repetitive production and more time on taste, judgment, and original thinking.

It will also look at how AI can help teams make better-informed work by quickly synthesizing the inputs that often shape a strong strategy: customer profiles, company overviews, and competitive assessments. Used well, AI can help organize context, surface patterns, and speed up the path from research to direction. But speed alone is not the goal. Good work still depends on people who know what to keep, what to question, what to discard, and how to shape something thoughtful, distinctive, and worth making.

Lauren Ackerman

SVP Integrated Services J. Schmid

AXCIOM SESSION

Speakers To Be Announced

SESSION TBA

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